Illustration by Drew Shannon
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I didn’t stop documenting my life. I just stopped sharing it. It started during the pandemic. The world was unraveling, the internet exploding, and suddenly every post felt like it had to be perfectly timed, worded, politicized. I work in PR. I know how to calibrate a message. But the judgment, the noise, the pressure to be visible in the “right” way? I couldn’t do it anymore.
So I stopped posting. No updates. No couple shots. No flat lays. My life moved forward, just not online. I had a baby. Didn’t post. Had another. Still didn’t post. The photos exist, thousands of them, but I didn’t want to share. And not for the reasons people usually assume. It wasn’t about safety, or privacy, or even my kids’ future right to choose.
Here’s the truth: I stopped sharing because it gave me too much anxiety. Every scroll left me feeling like I was falling behind. Behind on life goals, on beauty, on wealth, on parenting. I work in an industry built on aspiration, but even I couldn’t keep up with the filtered perfection. And if I couldn’t keep up, then what?
I’m stepping back from our culture of overwhelm, and bringing the kids with me
If my joy wasn’t beautiful enough to photograph, if my milestones didn’t line up with the timelines everyone else seemed to be following, if my house didn’t look like an Architectural Digest YouTube tour with light wood floors and fluted cabinetry, did it still count?
I thought stepping back might bring peace. Instead, it brought something else: disappearance. One night, shortly after my second was born, I ran into an old friend. Someone I used to see all the time and text or call every day. She looked at me, at the baby strapped to my chest, and blinked. “Wait… you had another one?”
She wasn’t being mean. She smiled, congratulated me, even suggested we catch up sometime. But I walked away reeling. I’d spent months in the thick of it. The exhaustion, the joy, the intensity of bringing another human into the world. And somehow, to people who once felt like lifelines, it hadn’t happened at all. Not really. Not visibly.
That moment cracked something open. I wasn’t just invisible online. I was invisible, full stop.
Before, I showed up on Instagram. I posted, replied, remembered birthdays, commented on milestones. And in return, people showed up for me. Group chats. Surprise treats dropped at my door. Friendships that stayed warm even after years apart. But when I stopped sharing, people stopped seeing.
The appliances in my house won’t stop beeping
My first pregnancy brought congratulations, a baby shower, regular check-ins. My second? Barely a ripple. No group text. No drop-ins. Not even a “how are you” from people who once felt central to my life.
It wasn’t malice. It was absence. A natural consequence of opting out of the feed, the scroll, the algorithm. But it made me question the shape of modern friendship. Is connection something you earn by performing it? And if you don’t post it, does it count?
As someone who helps brands stay visible and relevant, I think about this constantly. In marketing, consistency builds familiarity. Presence builds trust. You show up or you get forgotten. I know the rules. I just didn’t want to apply them to my family.
And I wish I could say it was a brave boundary. But really, it was self-preservation. Social media had become so performative. All curated joy or righteous outrage. I didn’t want to share my life just to prove it was happening. I didn’t want to caption my child’s first words on social media.
But I also didn’t, and still don’t, want to feel this invisible. Now I live somewhere in between. I don’t post the kids, but I send videos. I schedule walks. I write long birthday texts. I show up in smaller, more intentional ways. Offline, but not entirely out of sight.
Moving to a small town taught me about the solace of silence
It’s made me see my job and this industry differently, too. I help brands earn attention, stay present, stay relevant. I build visibility strategies for a living. And for the first time, I felt the cost of invisibility. Not for a company, but for a person. Me.
We talk a lot about authenticity in this business. But authenticity isn’t just about what you post. It’s about whether you opt in at all. And the hard truth is, our systems aren’t built for people who step back. If you don’t show up in the feed, in the scroll, in the search results, you fall away.
That’s true for brands. It’s true for mothers. It’s true for anyone living a life that doesn’t fit neatly into an algorithm.
So what happens when visibility becomes the price of connection? What does that mean for the way we market? For the way we design platforms? For how we show up for each other beyond a like or a share?
I don’t have all the answers. But I do know this: stepping back from the feed doesn’t make your life smaller. It simply reveals which connections were built to last without proof.
Lauren Thomson lives in Hamilton.